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Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions

Posted by timothy on from the ooh-how-sheik dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. from TFA by goose-incarnated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research university that was announced in 2007 and is due to open in a year from now ... "The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking," Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university's interim CIO, told Computerworld.

    Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    1. Re:from TFA by raju1kabir · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.

      Not odd if you've ever been to a Saudi university. They'll spend millions on this so they can say they have it, then it'll just sit there using electricity and being used to play Tetris.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    2. Re:from TFA by Entropius · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Except many computational physicists do in fact know how to code, and their stuff still requires big computers.

      What do you think they're doing, running COBOL on them? The lattice QCD code that I've seen is all in C. (Maybe you can teach them how to code? It's GPL, after all...)

      There are legitimate scientific uses of that many cycles.

  2. Re:Simulating... by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But this is their typical reaction. They buy something expensive, that looks good. Then they let it rot.

    A fool and his money ...